


A Memory Remains

by neverevesangel



Category: Heavy Rain
Genre: F/M, Major Spoilers, Mentions of child murder (I mean it's Heavy Rain), introspective, seriously don't read this if you haven't finished the game yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:01:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25165891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neverevesangel/pseuds/neverevesangel
Summary: Scott and Lauren, in hindsight. SPOILERS.
Relationships: Scott Shelby/Lauren Winter
Kudos: 13





	A Memory Remains

**Author's Note:**

> Listen to "A Memory Remains" by Narrow Skies while reading this, you can find it on YouTube. It's not a perfect fit but has a similar atmosphere. Please leave a comment! Edited on 10.07.2020 (see notes at the bottom).

Lauren Winter was never supposed to be there. She was the hitch in the plan, the unaccounted for variable.

At first, she’s like the others. He visited them all, mothers to dead sons. He offers them his kindness and makes them tea. He takes in their grateful smiles. (Would you have smiled, mother?)

Lauren is not like that. She is fire and fury. She latches onto the chance of vengeance, of agency in the face of grief, and by the time he realises that she would not be shook off, it is too late. He feels his stomach cramp uncomfortably with rogue thoughts of affection at her sight. One evening, he catches himself with something akin to regret.

He met her son by chance on the first day of autumn rain. The boy had looked up at him, wide-eyed, and he’d recognised the face that stared at him from below the surface on that long ago day in 1977. Scott remembers every second of it. He remembers the way the hand in his had spasmed when the water swallowed his brother. He’d clutched it in both his own, helpless.

The Winter boy stared up at him, wide-eyed, and he’d known it had to be him.

\---

The second time she comes to his apartment, he has his gun ready. He makes her tea. He thinks that a gun shot might attract unwanted attention and he abandons the idea. He reaches over her shoulder to place the tea cup before her and glances at her neck. It would not be as fast.

She reaches for the spoon, oblivious. Almost gently he clamps her mouth shut with one large hand, wraps the other around her throat and squeezes. There's the clatter of the spoon hitting porcelain. It occurs to him that suffocation is very similar to drowning, the same spasms are wracking her body as it struggles for oxygen. He smooths one thumb along her jaw in a weak attempt to comfort her.

It doesn't take long until Lauren Winter stills in his grip. Scott Shelby holds her against him carefully when he feels for her pulse (gone now), and exhales one final time. They are, in a way, dying in each other's arms. (He would like to believe that, anyway.)

With his next intake of air, the dead man becomes Scott Sheppard. He sets off to deal with the evidence.

\---

The second time she comes to his apartment, he has his gun ready. He makes her tea. He thinks that a gun shot might attract too much unwanted attention and he abandons the idea. He reaches over her shoulder to place the tea cup before her and glances at her neck. It would not be as fast.

She turns her head and smiles. She asks why he made no tea for himself.

 _Because I was going to drink yours_ , he wants to say, (but doesn’t).

Partners. She throws herself into the work with fervor. He catches himself wishing for a killer on the loose, a true case. He would keep her close, and she would ask her strange questions, and they would be celebrated throughout the city. Private investigators extraordinaire.

And she is relentless. He cannot risk her going off on her own and that makes it worse. One night, there is no pipe, no rushing water in his dreams. There is only the rain, beating a steady rhythm on his shoulders. And there’s her, and from her eyes, he can tell that she knows. She knows. From that dream he wakes with terror. For a second he thinks he’d rather have watched John drown again.

She mustn’t know.

He thinks of that when they are trapped in a drowning car, his hands freed, her unconscious form on the passenger seat. How simple to leave her, let the risk she poses be submerged under the waves. He considers that. Simple, but not easy.

A shard of glass slides deep into his skin when he smashes the window, pushing upwards, against the water rushing in, back to the surface. Lauren Winter drowns at the bottom of the lake. He leaves Scott Shelby behind on the passenger seat because nobody should have to drown alone.

Scott Sheppard thinks not of what could have been.

\---

She mustn’t know.

He thinks of that when they are trapped in a drowning car, his hands freed, her unconscious form on the passenger seat. How simple to leave her, let the risk she poses be submerged under the waves. He considers that. Simple, but not easy.

He wastes precious time looking at her, and he notices a smudge of mascara by her right eye where she cried again, and the next thing he knows, he’s smashing through the window and dragging her up, up with him to the surface.

When the end approaches he begins to understand that there can be no hiding. He thinks of a million ways to tell her but there is the memory of her son gurgling under the surface. Another dead child abandoned by his father. Not the mother, he means to say. Never the mother.

(In the true story, the mother abandoned the _living_ son. That is something he takes great care to banish from his mind.)

There is no world, no parallel universe, no possibility in the vastness of time, where she would ever forgive him.

(There is none where he would ever forgive his mother.)

At the train station, he says goodbye. He says that he will tell her everything when it is all over, and he means it, knowing it will never happen. He kisses her, and he means that, too. He memorises the weight of her against him. He understands that it is all to end before they can meet again.

Scott Shelby dies at the train station that day, he dies touching a finger to his lips. Scott Sheppard emerges from the building for the curtain call of the final act and he's humming to the sound of heavy rain.

\---

A grave is dug on the cemetery. They wrote Lauren Winter on her tombstone and someone is leaving orchids in its shadow.

\---

A grave is dug on the cemetery. They wrote Scott Shelby on his tombstone, and a woman visits with tears of rage.

\---

Two graves are dug on the cemetery. They wrote Scott Shelby on his tombstone, and no one comes to bring flowers.

**Author's Note:**

> I added variations to the story for the turning points in the story where Lauren might die, including one that is not in the game. I might write a companion piece from Lauren's point of view that covers the alternative scene where they both survive and she finds and kills him.


End file.
